There’s no denying the wealth of data available to medtech sales and marketing professionals. It’s a data-rich industry, and that pool of data is only set to expand. However, whilst medtech companies collect ever-increasing amounts of data, many are struggling to transform it into actionable insights.
Sales in particular is seeing a decisive shift away from an intuition-based approach to a more strategic, data-driven one. And the sheer volume of available data can be overwhelming – particularly for sales teams, who in reality won’t necessarily gain any strategic advantage from studying every individual metric.
However, despite the huge quantities of disconnected data pouring into medtech companies, much of it goes to waste when they remain too narrowly focused on sales data alone. At the same time, incoming data is often siloed into discrete channels and remains disconnected, underused, or even unused.
Although medtech companies might be aware of the untapped potential of their data stores, the real challenge lies in connecting it up to inform better sales decisions and reduce the time spent by reps chasing down prospects who aren’t a good fit. That’s where an omnichannel approach can add value by helping to align data across marketing, sales, and field teams.
Alignment
A single data stream enables clearer insights on prospects, something that’s vital for the medtech industry where markets can be highly niche, and key influencers can be widely dispersed around the globe.
With a clearer picture of activity, an omnichannel approach means that marketing and sales will not only identify the best prospects, they can take a much more targeted approach to engaging those prospects, using strategies that are more personalised, meaningful, and likely to lead to repeat business — and increased sales.
Integration
The nature of the medtech industry means that there may be a wealth of available data, but it may not be directly relevant to a product’s new or emerging market. The key is to explore what you can learn from existing market data, as well as creating the potential to plug-in new data into your wider systems as and when it becomes available.
If data is siloed and disconnected, insights will be limited. Integration means you can start to link up common parts of discrete data sets to build valuable insights. A simple example might involve two records: one showing only a hospital name, and another showing a name and address. If there’s a strong similarity, a connection is made. This might reveal that a prospect involved with a clinical study is based in a particular hospital. In turn, you may discover an existing relationship with that hospital and the rep involved, and so on.
Action
With connected data used in the right way, sales and marketing can drive better engagement. In order to do that, medtech companies need to have clear objectives and a strategy around what they’re trying to achieve, to avoid creating data for its own sake.
Typically, it’s a case of knowing where different leads sit within the conversion funnel, from being on the radar of decision makers to getting a clinical trial. For that reason, data needs to be aligned with the strategy, so the analytics provides an interpretation of the data which can be relayed back to the objective.
Building a bigger picture
There are ways to connect disparate data from multiple sources to create insights that give medtech marketing and sales teams the competitive edge they need in a complex industry.
Better alignment of data leads to stronger integration between sales and marketing, and yields powerful intelligence that can create greater profitability in the long term.
In fact, a study from McKinsey revealed that companies using data and analytics are twice as likely to generate above average-average profits — and spend up to 20% less on marketing.
It’s worth connecting your data, then.
At Toxeos, we’re empowering medtech companies with the data they need to have meaningful conversations with their customers. Get in touch to learn how.
